Meaning, Understanding, and Quantification in the History of Ideas

Jeff Jacobs

University of Chicago, April 28, 2023

Section 1: Background

Word Counts: Good Enough?

  • 4 keywords per section:
Section Keywords
U.S. state, court, federal, republican
World government, country, officials, minister
Arts music, show, art, dance
Sports game, league, team, coach
Real Estate home, bedrooms, bathrooms, building
  • For each article, vote for section with highest keyword count:
Arts Real Estate Sports U.S. News World News Total
Correct 3020 690 4860 1330 1730 11630
Incorrect 750 60 370 1100 590 2870
Accuracy 0.801 0.920 0.929 0.547 0.746 0.802

What’s Missing?

…Context!

You shall know a word by the company it keeps.

Article A:

President Bush said he was trying to convince President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that cooperation was “in Russia’s security interests,” even though Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates did not win Mr. Putin’s support during a trip to Moscow last week.

“Bush Steps Up Effort to Persuade Putin on Missile Defense Plan”, NYTimes, 1 May 2007.

Article B:

President Bush began his day yesterday at dawn on the golf course. He began Saturday on the golf course, too. A weekend earlier, the president played two rounds of 18 holes on the course at Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington.

“White House Letter; Bush Makes Quick Work of Relaxing”, NYTimes, 5 August 2002.

The Cambridge School and Contextual History

  • What are political actors doing with words?
    • “condemning, opposing, resisting, demanding, beseeching, supporting, rewarding […] attacking, expelling, cursing, cheering, singing” (Tilly 2008)

Illocutions and Perlocutions

Section 2: Models of Meaning and Context

Raw Word Embeddings

  • What do they “mean”?

Manually-Projected Word Embeddings

  • Researcher imposes meaning

Clustered Word Embeddings

  • Continuous Spectra \(\rightarrow\) Discrete Clusters

The Geometry of Political Thought

Hobbes’s analysis of liberty in Leviathan represents not a revision but a repudiation of what he had earlier argued, […] a substantial change in the character of his moral thought.

The 1844 Marx was still operating within the ideological field of Young Hegelianism.

[Khomeini] now used [mostazafin] to mean the angry ‘oppressed masses’, a meaning it had acquired in the early 1960s when [Ali] Shariati and his disciples translated Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth as Mostazafin-e Zamin.

Constructing Contextual Fields

  • Word2Vec
  • BERT

The Empirics of Influence: Historical Sketches

  • Structure vs. Agency
  • Case Studies
    • Text-Mining Influence Claims
    • History of Marxism

Text-Mining Influence Claims

  • \(X\) influenced \(Y\)”? Let’s zoom in on mechanisms:
  • Collaboration: “Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels carried on one of the great intellectual collaborations in the history of scientific research.” (Gandy 1979, ii)
  • Mentorship: for example, “the grandly-titled was begun in 1915 following Wittgenstein’s tenure at Cambridge under [Bertrand] Russell’s mentorship” (Wright 2006, 72)
  • Reading: for example, ``Not only had Marx read Hegel’s in 1858, but we know that he studied it once again in 1860.’’ (Dussel 2002, 195)
  • Shared Intellectual Community: “Schelling and Hegel first met at the Tübingen Seminary in 1790, and the two young men shared a room there during their student years” (Levine 2006, 124)
  • Shared Geography: for example, ``Lenin was an occasional visitor in Vienna. Hitler, like Trotsky, had lived there for years.” (Morton 1990, 290)
  • Rivalry: for example, ``the cultural philosophy of the Historical School and, more particularly, of Hegel’s rival at the University of Berlin, Friedrich Schleiermacher.” (Toews 1985, 7)

The Point is To Change It

  • Theoretical Innovation \(\overset{?}{\longleftrightarrow}\) Political Practice

Thank You!

  • Questions?

References

Abrahamian, Ervand. 1993. Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic. University of California Press.
Dussel, Enrique. 2002. Towards An Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1861-63. Routledge.
Firth, John Rupert. 1957. Papers in Linguistics, 1934-1951. Oxford University Press.
Gandy, D. Ross. 1979. Marx and History: From Primitive Society to the Communist Future. University of Texas Press.
Levine, Norman. 2006. Divergent Paths: The Hegelian Foundations of Marx’s Method. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Löwy, Michael. 1973. The Theory of Revolution in the Young Marx. London: Brill.
Morton, Frederic. 1990. Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914. Collier Books.
Skinner, Quentin. 2008. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, Charles. 2008. Contentious Performances. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Toews, John Edward. 1985. Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805-1841. Cambridge University Press.
Wright, James Kenneth. 2006. Schoenberg, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. Peter Lang.